CREATING ONLINE LEARNING SPACES FOR PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS: A MACEDONIAN-USA COLLABORATION

This paper reports on an exploratory study of a 7-week pre-service online teaching course between a Macedonian and a USA university. The main aim of the project was to explore teaching from new perspectives, enable networking between prospective teachers from the two cultures and promote teacher research among the students, while developing their global competences. The course employed two online environments and a video-conferencing platform to facilitate interaction. It was moderated by the students’ instructors, one from each culture. This paper outlines the structure of the course and presents a selection of the materials which were specifically designed for the purposes of the course. It then goes on to review the students’ learning experiences on the course. A preliminary thematic analysis of the Macedonian students’ reflective entries revealed that they enjoyed juxtaposing their local teaching contexts to their counterparts’, while learning about how the two contexts compared with regard to the teaching methodologies used and the kinds of learning spaces created. The students also benefited from learning about each other’s cultures more generally, including adjusting to each other’s time zones. This paper rounds off with suggestions about how international online collaborative endeavours like the one described here could be improved.